"toypup" wrote in message
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"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
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toypup wrote:


"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
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Budgets often don't work that way, especially in
a bigger school system. It's unlikely that they'd be able
to transfer monies between payroll and much of anything
else. Plus, if they don't have the money to maintain the
instruments, they won't be useful for long.

When I was a kid (and we were quite poor, the school was gang infested,
etc.) we either borrowed the instruments from school or bought our own,
if we could afford it. Unless the instruments broke down,

But the point is that the instruments *do* break
down, and need regular maintenance. It's not all just
the little things like the everyday supplies. And there
are the instruments that aren't assigned to an individual
child (like most of the percussion instruments).

Yes, they do break, but it's a mighty poorly made instrument that would
break its first year of use, so you get at least an entire year's worth of
a class out of it. Most all of them last much longer than that. I had my
secondhand violin for many years without maintenance of any sort besides
strings. It finally disintegrated in my closet when I checked it last,
but a secondhand cheapo violin would have held those students right on
through college without replacing anything more than rosin and strings.

I understand that some things cost more to have than not, but if the
school had a music program or wanted a music program to begin with, then
instruments are a necessity, whether they are donated or bought by the
school. Wouldn't the school prefer them donated? If they already had
some, they could use the donated ones as backup for when the other ones
break down.
If you want to avoid major repairs down the line, you need to do maintenance
regularly, just like on your car. And yes, that adds up. A person who only
uses an instrument for 2-3 years might not notice, but instruments in a
school setting usually have to last 10 years or more. You're saying "no
repairs but strings" on a violin. Having a violin restrung and set up to
MENC standards for a beginning student, which is what is needed if you want
an instrument which will be playable by a beginner who can't do their own
minor adjustments (and no, a band director who has nearly 100 students in a
beginning instrumental class can't do those adjustments either, because that
band director already HAS a full-time job teaching music to everyone else in
the school!) is about $75 a year. And no, a secondhand, cheapo violin would
not get a child through high school and college on only rosin and strings.
Number 1, the quality of the instrument wouldn't be such to allow it.
College students, and even serious high school players, need an intermediate
or professional level instrument. Instead of getting a car in high school, I
got the professional level saxophone I needed for college. And the sax
probably cost more than many of my friend's used cars, and number 2, if
you're playing regularly, eventually the bridge and the fingerboard will
need to be replaced, because the strings cause a lot of friction, and oils
from the students' fingers eventually break down the wood (which is already
getting microscratches and scrapes from the wire strings) over time. The
cheaper the instruments, the softer the wood used, and usually the sooner
they'll need replacement.

Bow hairs on violins should also be replaced yearly.

And violins are about the simplest instrument (except for maybe a drum) in
the orchestra or band. Brass instruments are pretty simple, but welds
between sections need to be checked, and major dents hammered out. Woodwinds
have myriad little pads and keys that need replacement and adjustment, and
that's just the nature of the beast. The younger the player, the more this
is needed, simply because younger players are less exact at how they place
their fingers, less careful with their cases and tend to end up knocking
their instruments around more. They also tend to be less careful at drying
out the instrument, so pads rot faster. In most cases, clarinets and
saxophones played by beginners will have several pads that need replaced
within a year, and, again, the key mechanism has to be readjusted yearly.
Yes, the instrument will still play if you don't do it, but you're talking
that the sound suffers and that the instrument will get harder and harder to
play as the years progress.

In this case, the school did not have a band program. It had a general music
program, parents who wanted a band program because of all the research
indicating that this was a good idea, and a teacher hired for general music
who was qualified to teach band as well. The opportunity came up for several
schools to get new instrumental music programs-and they had to be NEW
programs, not existing ones. Unfortunately, while the district and the
companies involved got a ton of good press from making this big donation to
several low income schools, they'd neglected to provide anything else.

The result is that we had instruments-but no consumables. Chairs, since the
school had them, but only a half dozen music stands. We did have beginning
band books for the first year-luckily, ASCAP and Yamaha both made donations
to schools that recieved the instruments.

In the first year, I was able to dig up local funding to cover most of the
consumables, and we only needed one repair. But that summer, when really,
all the instruments should have been gone over and refit, I spent hundreds
of hours doing the work I could do on them myself unpaid-because we simply
didn't have the money to pay for it.

The second year, again, I beat the curbs to pay for consumables, and those
donated band books, which usually are only used for one year, were starting
to fall apart.

At that point, I got pregnant, and took a year leave of absense. The
director who came into the school was shocked that the repairs and
maintenance I'd marked needed to be done hadn't been. I wasn't.

Don't know what happened since, given that I decided not to return to
full-time teaching and took a part-time adjunct position instead, but I have
a feeling that unless they get another fairly young teacher with missionary
zeal who is willing to volunteer a lot of time and effort, the school
probably won't have an instrumental program, because in 5 years, without
maintenance, the instruments will NOT be functional-or, in many cases,
repairable.

I have seen this happen again and again with large grants, and that includes
much federal funding. Big, flashy things are funded, but the day to day
costs of using them aren't. So teachers are granted new, fancy computers to
use with their students, but no software (and in the pre-internet,
networking days, that made them mostly expensive paperweights), paper, or
printer cartridges. Or a program is adopted and granted which has
consumable books or keep books for little kids to take home, but no funds
are provided to replace said books each year. Or, they haven't considered
loss and replacement-one very expensive grant funded program put
playstations with specific software designed to work on educational things
in student homes. At the end of the year, almost half the playstations were
either "lost" or broken. So much for that program-and so much for a lot of
money.

I have never seen a grant that was actually money which could be spent where
needed. They're always stuff-and usually only the large ticket, fancy,
bragging rights stuff.

The only school I've seen that doesn't have a mismash remnant of such
assorted programs is my DD's private one, where everything is paid up front
by parents (or by the religious group that supports the school to a pretty
hefty amount), and the school can purchase exactly what they need and no
more.